Borderline

If we all can't travel or see loved ones across borders, please tell me at least it’s working.

In May, I found myself in tears when the British government decided to impose quarantines on anyone returning from France in order to combat covid-19. That was the last straw. How dare they close *my* border? Did it even serve a purpose? When in doubt, go to the library. I turned to science to find out if I had been right to cry or if indeed, the government was doing the right thing. What I found out is... it's complicated.

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Sources & further reading

• Delaying the Covid-19 epidemic in Australia: evaluating the effectiveness of international travels bans, Adeshina Adekunle, Michael Meehan, Diana Rojas‐Alvarez, James Trauer and Emma McBryde. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 2020 Vol. 44 No. 4.
• Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work?, Baltazar Espinoza, Carlos Castillo-Chavez, Charles Perrings. PLoS ONE 15(7).
• Travel restrictions and infectious disease outbreaks, Ria Vaidya, MSc, Asha Herten-Crabb, MSc, Julia Spencer, MSc, Suerie Moon, PhD, Louis Lillywhite, MSc. Journal of Travel Medicine, Volume 27, Issue 3, April 2020.
• Covid-19 pandemic planning scenarios, US Centers for Disease Control, updated 10 September 2020
• WHO Director-General Dr Tedros address to the 146th Session of the Executive Board, 3 February 2020
• Simulating an epidemic, 3Blue1Brown, 27 March 2020
• Ski, Parti, Seed a Pandemic: The Travel Rules that Let Covid-19 Take Flight, Selam Gebrekidan, Katrin Bennhold, Matt Apuzzo and David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times, 30 September 2020.

Credits

Music by Dyalla. Additional music by Chris Zabriskie.

Sounds by PiR2, straget, thorvandahl and InspectorJ on freesound.org, under Creative Commons license

Globalisation isn’t just the stuff of airplanes and container ships. It’s not colonisation and circumnavigation alone. It started much sooner. Dr Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University, points to the year 1000 as one early watershed era when the world expanded and became smaller at once. Trade routes criss-crossed the Americas, Islamic scholars mapped the globe and major religions spread across Asia. In large cities, exotic merchants set up shop, black and white people lived together... and sometimes mobs descended on reviled foreigners.

01:38 A convergence of global events in 1000

06:26 250 million people and an agricultural boom

09:20 Trade and religion made the world smaller

14:02 Slavery introduced the masses to a wider world

15:48 Southeast Asia, world factory

17:13 How to become a Borderline member

18:07 The globe and the average Joe

20:17 Xenophobia back then

25:02 A series of constantly expanding rings

29:50 How that globalisation differed from today's

📚The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. By Dr Valerie Hansen. Simon & Schuster, 2020. Buy in US. Buy in UK.

Exchange students aren’t just the butt of jokes in American teen comedies. They’re young people going through one of the most transformative experiences life has to offer. Expanding it to more children – dare we say, to all children? – could change not just them, but the world.

Katherine Alexander-Dobrovolskaia was dropped in Iowa from the newly broken-up Soviet Union in 1993. Borderline host Isabelle Roughol landed in New Jersey two weeks before 9/11. They reminisce and reflect on the impact of those formative years and share guidance for young people leaving home now – or returning, changed.

00:00 Intro

01:23 Pandemic and cancer

04:01 Vulnerability and what it means to be there for one another

07:13 From Moscow to Africa to Iowa

12:10 Being a young stranger in a foreign land

15:14 How technology ruined it

18:39 Dreaming of a borderless world

22:37 Imagining an universal youth exchange

24:32 How to become a Borderline member

25:36 Learning empathy through lots of cringe

32:19 The returnee’s blues & fitting in nowhere and everywhere

38:33 Outro

💪 Help out: Kate’s daughter, Masha Shishkina, is raising funds to help rare cancer patients like herself fund their treatment. Donate here.

📬 Read, listen, subscribe & support on Substack | 🍎 Listen on Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Listen on Spotify | 📺 Watch on YouTube | 🌍 borderlinepod.com

Will Buckingham gave me my new favourite word. He's a philosopher so it's only right the word should be Greek. Philoxenia is the word. Love of the foreign. It's that sense of curiosity, desire to connect and good will that make us seek out those we don't know and invite them to share our hearth. It's the cat that runs up to a house guest to smell his hand and rub against new legs. But we fear the stranger too as much as we wish for him. The cat hisses, scratches and hides under the sofa. You know that word – xenophobia.

Will Buckingham explores what the stranger means to us and why philoxenia is worth cultivating. In this episode:
🤝 home is a social network
💪 stranger danger is male danger
🏡 safety at home, danger abroad is a false story
👀 how busy-buddy neighbours keep us safe
👥 sorry introverts: you'll never be rid of strangers
Also backpacking in Pakistan, slow Ubers in Bangalore, Manggarai villages in Indonesia, a vicarage in Norfolk, a foggy morning in Prague, a Lithuanian philosopher called Emmanuel Levinas and paper-thin walls in Paris.

Show notes

[00:02:38] "You can think about home as a set of social network of belongings"
[00:08:48] "I'll never again be lost in a foreign city"
[00:11:49] "A split between the safety of the home and the risk of the outside"[
00:15:15] Philoxenia vs xenophobia
[00:18:31] "That notion of the inviolable home is quite culturally specific"
[00:22:25] "Somebody would end up putting me up"
[00:24:35] "There's always going to be somebody rocking up to break up your solitude"
[00:28:39] Become a Borderline member
[00:29:57] "Concentric circles of how we imagine belonging"
[00:31:41] "The stranger brings me more than I can contain"
[00:32:57] "An inconvenience worth having"
[00:34:57] "Fear in the face of strangers is not wholly unreasonable"
[00:39:50] Outro

📚 Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World, by Will Buckingham. Granta. 2021. Buy it here.
📬 Sign up for Will's monthly newsletter
🐦 Follow Will on Twitter @willbuckingham

"Ukraine has provided us with, I think, the most striking, the most rapid, the most swift and complete legal offensive or lawfare strategy that has ever been implemented."

In this episode
🇺🇦 Ukraine's aggressive lawfare strategy
⚖️ International justice finally comes for the West
🤐 Why former great powers can't cope with their colonial crimes
🇫🇷 Reckoning with the Algerian War
🇨🇩 The DR Congo schools us on prosecuting environmental destruction
🇨🇴 Transitional justice lessons from Colombia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and more
🕊 Restitutions, reparations and truth commissions – justice beyond the courts

Show notes
[00:00:16] Intro
[00:01:42] "There is a before Ukraine and an after Ukraine"
[00:07:18] "Justice has become the third weapon of Ukraine's strategy"
[00:11:46] Is lawfare a communication tool?``
[00:15:39] The slow wheels of the ICC
[00:18:43] Justice gets much more pragmatic at the local level: the example of environmental crimes in the DRC
[00:25:52] A renewed interest in justice for indigenous people
[00:28:58] Colombia, a case study for all-encompassing transitional justice
[00:30:14] Why are some countries better than other at looking into their colonial past?
[00:32:26] The restitution of pillaged objects
[00:34:28] A generational reckoning with colonial crimes: the French Algerian war
[00:40:13] Statues, history vs memory and the new frontline of transitional justice
[00:42:53] Outro

🌍 justiceinfo.net
📚 The Master of Confessions, by Thierry Cruvellier. Ecco Press. 2015. Find it here.

🧬 Check out The Guardian's Science Weekly podcast, where I'm executive producer for the next few weeks.